


Nothing of Him That Doth Fade

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: The Gracekeepers - Kirsty Logan
Genre: F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 22:52:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8942746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: In Ursa's small world, unfamiliar things begin to appear.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AntigravityDevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntigravityDevice/gifts).



The first was a small stone branch like the tree in the books the traders had brought them. It had been set on the open window with Ursa’s other treasures between a twisted piece of metal that Mother had said looked like a bear and a finger of sandy grey driftwood. “Not stone,” Callanish said. “Coral. Well. It is stone, but stone made of tiny dead things. There was more of it, once, when there was less water.”

Mother smiled at it with a faint line between her eyes and put it on the mantle near the filter. Her fingers stroked the strange, pink-grey roughness with Ursa’s, spelling out stories in it. “Like a tree,” she said, smiling down at Ursa in her lap.

“Like the landlocker’s tree. At North-East 19.”

“The World Tree? It doesn’t look like it’s a tree for a very big world.”

“A little world. One like ours.”

“Is this a world?”

“You and Callanish and I and the graces. We have a world and people come to it and visit it.”

“You’re right.” Mother reached over to puff out the candle on the windowsill. “What song would you like tonight?”

“The play song, please.”

Mother smoothed down Ursa’s hair, with a look out into the starlight that danced on the water and the bars of the newer grace cages. The song, which had once been sung by a person named Melia to landlockers who threw coins and flowers, drew a blanket of sleep over Ursa’s head, burying her in dreams of dark and light and sighing waves:

_Full fathom five thy father lies;_

_Of his bones are coral made;_

_Those are pearls that were his eyes:_

_Nothing of him that doth fade,_

_But doth suffer a sea-change_

_Into something rich and strange._

The second was a bottle, whorled and green as the sea around them. Callanish bit her lip and checked the tally of days marked in chalk by the window. She stared out the window until Ursa saw Mother step behind her, burying her face in the pale cloud of her hair.

“Odell hasn’t been here while we were diving, has he? Or that last resting party again?” Callanish asked.

“No, no one has. Could you have just forgotten?”

“I know the place of everything in this house as well as you, and—“ Callanish snapped. “I’m sorry.” A rustle of skirts and she was in Mother’s arms, like Ursa when she fell or a storm shoved the house around like a ball on the floor. “Maybe it was after all. Those new bottles are different; maybe they’re making them differently and we just haven’t noticed.”

That afternoon Mother traveled to the end of the dock after Ursa and Callanish. Feet dangling in the water, she sewed bright beads that the last resting party had given them onto the hem of Ursa’s left-behind dress. “There’s nothing wrong with being pretty just for yourself,” she had said to Callanish’s questioning frown, and Ursa had heard her asking Mother later on for sparkling sea glass chips on the bodice of her Resting dress. “To look more alive still, when the sun’s out,” she had admitted, and Mother had grinned and kissed her. Now, Ursa saw her just before surfacing, a blur in green and brown rippling into a single piece with the cloth in her lap, waving to her and Callanish as they broke through the waves with bags full of seaweed and mussels and sometimes fish too slow to avoid quick hands. Ursa found treasures, too: tiny winkle shells with holes through the center like pupils, a hollow piece of pottery that might serve as a cup if one broke, stones that sparkled in water but turned drab in the sun for her to keep in a bowl of water on her windowsill. Later, when Callanish and Mother were tangled together in their bed behind the screen Mother had sewn for them, Ursa slipped from her bed to examine the bottles saved under the stove cabinet for fresh water. In the moonlight the new ones were clear, with square corners and marks stamped on the bottoms with the coordinates of where they came from. Ursa held the little round sea-clouded bottle up to them, lips pursed with interest.

When the third appeared, Ursa remembered the confusion and worry and reached a decision. First, she placed the little algae-caked figure, long-nosed and sharp-eared like the horses Mother drew for her in chalk on the empty stretch of floor beside the door, on the windowsill. A moment and her nightdress was hanging neatly on its peg and the door was unlatched and she was off along the storm-smoothed boards of the docks. The waves lazily reached up toward her as she slipped into their cool hold before kicking off past the rows of grace cages and into the depths beyond her window.

The city was the first place she remembered swimming, when Callanish had feared to let her explore the graceyard for fear of dead, rotting things where the rested damplings lay. While Mother sat in the cottage scheming ways to join them involving bladder wracks and wax-treated sailcloth, Ursa and Callanish explored the buckled cobblestone streets and sunken monuments placed between stone houses that still kept their shape. The treasures that came from there were little square stones from the great picture of mountains along one stone wall, (‘mosaics,’ Callanish called them when they could speak again) or bright scraps of blue-and-white bowls, or metal thin as cloth and rusted into a film like lace. It was a place to gather such things, pretty things left behind by the people of the past, and thus surely a place for the only ones who might come to the house without a boat or a trace of themselves otherwise would find things. It was now only a matter of finding them, somewhere in the rocky city.

Mother told Ursa the story on nights when she didn’t sing: _A man from the sea came and gave you to me, like the one who gave Callanish to her mother. He gave you your gills, and your webs, but everything else was from me. I never knew him, but from him came you and so I never needed him. Not when I had you. There must be more, but I’ve never seen them._ Yet Ursa had, she thought—shapes in the water too big to be fish or the shadows of boats, though whenever Callanish looked they were gone. They moved like Callanish when she swam, not like Mother when she kicked just under the surface in safe reach of the air, and Ursa shot out after them only to be grabbed by the ankle. _Not safe that way,_ Callanish told her when they surfaced. Her scars puckered and relaxed like the gills between them as she remembered to breathe the air again. _You don’t bother them and they won’t bother you, like the resting parties. If they wanted to speak to us, they would speak to us._

The sand-buried buildings around her looked unfamiliar, and Ursa surfaced into a bank of fog. Through the shrouding grey she could not see where she had come from, nor where she was now. She treaded water, whistling and cooing to the graces in the outer cages that sometimes answered her and could guide her and Callanish home through fog when it caught them far from the house. Nothing answered. Another series of calls, and in the silence, Ursa frowned. Best to swim back down, to find her way back through the city to the house before the others worried, toward the dark shape through the fog.

The shape moved, suddenly, flicking under the waves like a guttering candle, and Ursa squinted at it. A splash and it was suddenly to her right, the veil of fog shrouding all but… was it a head? Ursa giggled, despite herself, and turned toward the shape. It sank again before reappearing in the lift of a wave that seemed to come from nowhere. Another wave swelled, then another, and then the noise of wood and sails were coming from everywhere. The boat wasn’t big, a fishing vessel like those which brought them supplies on their ways north sometimes, but the fog had brought it near enough for her to nearly touch the two leaning over the side with—

There was a shrill cry somewhere to her right and Ursa unfroze, diving away from the side but slow, too slow to escape the twine that cut into her skin as she was hauled up and out of the water to rough hands, shouting voices: “See? I told you, they live here! Get it below!”


	2. Chapter 2

“I live in a graceyard at North 5! When the fog lifts you can probably see it! Just take me back there, please!”

“Graceyards are sacred places, little liar. If you think for a moment that we’re going to go on some snipe hunt—“ The speaker, a broad, muscled woman with dark hair and tattoos like the people Mother had once known, stopped abruptly as Ursa was suddenly sprawled across the bottom of the fishing boat. The chain that had been fastened around her wrist wrenched it hard and she bit her lip to keep from crying. “Damn it, Meridian, don’t damage the merchandise,” she snapped with a glance toward the taller, equally brown and muscled woman who had shoved Ursa forward. “They pay more if they’re undamaged, even if they’re dead.”

“It’s not merchandise, you stupid bitch! It’s guilt!” Meridian snapped back. “We’re as likely to meet a military vessel as a ship around here. We barely scraped through the bribes for our last fisher’s license renewal; do you think we’ll be let off with a blessing and a prayer if they find _that_ aboard? We’ll be lucky not to be buried alive with it when they take it!”

“It’s not the military that buries them alive. And we’ve hidden things before,” Dark Hair insisted, jerking her chin toward the cold chest behind Ursa that gave off a soft but permeating fishy stink.

Ursa tried to speak, to tell them that she wasn’t merchandise or a thing people would bury them under a tree for, but Meridian’s voice was loud now, drowning her out. “I don’t know what you and Jas were thinking! If you had the sense the gods of land or sea gave you you’d let us throw it back overboard!”

“And have her return with a school of more of the same to sink us for touching their brat? I heard of one ship up at North West 12 that pulled one up and had the same happen to them!” Dark Hair stood up, glaring at the frowning clouds just visible through the hatch to the deck. “What’s done is done, and a storm’s coming anyway. Get to your posts and see that everything’s locked down. When the—“ A swell washed over the deck and she stumbled, nearly stepping onto Ursa’s hand. “When we have a moment to think we’ll put it to the rest of the crew.”

“Fine, but it’s staying in the hold. I’m not having it in the cabin.”

“I won’t hurt you!” Ursa cried after the two. “I just want to go home!”

There was no answer as the boat pitched again. Ursa thought of the few times they had sailed the rowing boat to visit Odell (her hands gloved like Callanish's, neck wrapped in a scarf) as well as the storms that tore at the house on its thick chains. Dark Hair had said a long way from North 5: would they be carried still further away from the equator by the storm? Above the suddenly howling wind, shouting: _Jas, Meridian, lock it down, get that up there, no there's no time, just shove it in the hold with -_ Words drowned in thunder. _Hold the rudder! No, let it -_ Ursa put her hands over her head and groaned to keep from sobbing.

The bow dipped, and over the shouting a heavy crate balanced on top of another toppled over, inches from the cold chest. Ursa didn't scream. She couldn't have been heard even if fear hadn't locked away her breath like the chains. Her eyes, the single part of her she could move, flicked about the dank dark of the hold, over empty crates with pictures of fish stamped on the sides and sacks of salt bigger than she was. The pouch she wore for diving was gone, snatched by the third crewwoman and tossed aside for its empty status. By the tilting of the ship she did her best to determine which way the wind was blowing them, but each lurch with a big wave disoriented her and without knowing which way the graceyard was it was useless anyway. At her feet the ship's wood creaked, the masts overhead roared like a bear in the wind, and Ursa could see water pooling in corners. If they sank... but no, she was chained like a grace's cage with wood and metal too strong for anything near her to cut or break. The ship would sink and she would lie with the ship until she drank the salt water for want of anything else and died, until her bones were coral, her eyes were pearls -

A bang from the deck hatch, and a curtain of spray sluiced over the boards. It was only when the white foam had melted into clear water that she saw the lurch of tattoos and bared scalp toward her. The sailor Meridian glanced toward Ursa, hate in her eyes, then toppled forward into the pooling bilgewater. From behind her stepped someone else: sleek and dark and moving with the roll of the ship. A woman, sea-pale and naked, sand-dark hair to her hips and with a frill of fluttering gills at her neck so different from Callanish's slits that Ursa gasped.

"Help!" the woman shouted, and Ursa opened her mouth to protest that she couldn't, only for her words to catch in her throat. A small, dark shape, the miniature of the woman's, darted forward to just before where Ursa crouched with skinned knees and splinters in her fingers. She jerked her head toward the woman and called something that sounded like "can't." The woman bared her teeth and shouted something back. In her hand flashed a knife and she strode toward Ursa, who finally screamed. "No!" the woman snapped. "To free!"

The little one was suddenly at her side and the two spoke, calmly but so fast Ursa could hardly make out anything in the high, whistle-clucking talk. "Key," she heard, and nodded hard. "The one with the dark hair! She put it in her pocket!"

At a vigorous nod from the little one, the woman nodded. "She fell. Look low," Ursa heard, and the little one scrambled toward the open hatch. A pressure of damp fingers and her wrist and Ursa flinched away from the knife, only to blink down at the woman sliding it into the keyhole of the chains.

"And she can't see," the woman told her, stroking her free fingers over the back of Ursa's hand. The webs there were milkily translucent, a shade clearer than the rest of her skin, and Ursa stared _._

“Is she your daughter?” Ursa asked. She mimed rocking a baby in her free arm, and the woman nodded with another stroke of Ursa's hand and what might, under the sea, have been a smile.

***

They were as beautiful as Mother had said, pale and dark and graceful like kelp ribboning just under the surface of the water. Ursa, still too tired from the swim of hours with no drinking water, the woman - the mother - dragging her by the arm for the last few knots, watched through the sliver of open door as Mother's dark head and Callanish's pale bent together over the edge of the dock.

"...know them, like you." The mother's voice was halting and sometimes too high to hear, filled with odd pauses and clicks that didn't fit any words Ursa knew. “...not many live so...”

"Then why? ...to us before now..." Calanish tossed her hair out of her face, bright in the storm-fresh sunshine, the gratitude still shining through her exasperation.

A flick of water shining through the air as the mother ducked her drying head below the waves lapping the pylons. "She saw yours gather, brought things... I said no... men come, women come..." Her way of speaking, words strangely placed like rocks unsteady underfoot, made Ursa cock an ear toward the door. Perhaps it was how the ones before had sounded before they grew gills and took to the water, short and terse with no wasted meaning. Or perhaps it was only how they knew the language of those above, with their own below the waves to carry through space thicker than air.

"Damplings. ...less afraid. But I understand." Mother knelt on the dock. "Thank you. You might have..."

"...hers?" The mother's face flicked between North and the cottage door.

Mother shook her head. "Mine. One of yours... you know?"

An impatient hand gesture. "No. Like yours. Anyone... and he lives I don't know."

With a glance toward the open door, then one toward Callanish, Mother smiled. "...hardly matters." 

Ursa planted unsteady feet on the floor, stepped toward the shaft of light. At the end of the dock the three still spoke, stumbling toward an understanding of where they fit together within the place they had all come to. At Ursa's feet she heard a splash off the side of the dock and glanced down. The little one was staring up at her, extending her hand in a silent wave.

“Thank you. For all your gifts,” Ursa told her, with a wave of her hand to the window where the treasures lay. To the fishing boat, drifting without its cargo of dead, cruel women. To herself, to the sea whence she had been given to her mothers and where those like her swam and watched, changed and distant from landlockers and damplings alike but now within her sight and reach. The sight and reach of those who could go between landlockers and damplings, between air and ocean, accepted fully by neither world but belonging to both.

From her place below the pilings, the little one grinned.

**Author's Note:**

> My heart absolutely soared when I saw that someone else had requested The Gracekeepers. I nominated it, but was unable to sign up because of Reasons, so my writing this was my way of living the YT magic vicariously through someone else. Anyway, I hope this hits all the beats you were hoping for, and a very happy Yuletide to you and yours.


End file.
